September 2016 Issue

Our look at the state of automation in the food and beverage industry stumbles upon a big question: How do you quantify, much less prove, ROI on many leading-edge projects? We grapple with that in our September cover story, while the rest of the issue wrestles with how to develop products for snake people and how to replace synthetic preservatives with natural ones.

We also got a peek into Walmart's new product development center. John Stanton tells of the opportunities within Amazon's foray into food retailing. And if you missed July's IFT Food Expo, we have a roundup of the new ingredients ... as well as four novel processing technologies discussed there. Plus our usual departments of food safety, news and new consumer products.

New and emerging technologies can take years to find a food manufacturing audience. This year’s IFT Food Expo included several innovative drying and kill-step technologies at various stages of the development cycle.